Despite the November 13 massacres in Paris and the revelation that one of the Islamic State (IS) attackers apparently arrived in Europe as a “migrant,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who defeated Stephen Harper in last month’s election, remains determined to fast-track 25,000 Syrian migrants into Canada by year’s end.
Indeed, one cabinet position has already been politicized by being renamed from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration to Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship.
I have been told by someone in the military that housing is already being built at some Canadian bases for incoming refugees.
As well, Trudeau still intends to pull out of the air war against IS in Iraq.
Trudeau’s decision regarding refugees is at the moment causing less disquiet here than in Europe or the United states. But we don’t have thousands of people arriving on our shores every week and we are an immigrant-populated country.
Still, there has been some pushback. Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall wants the federal government to suspend its plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of the year. In a letter to Trudeau, Wall said he was concerned bringing in refugees could undermine the refugee screening process.
“I understand that the overwhelming majority of refugees are fleeing violence and bloodshed and pose no threat to anyone,” wrote Wall. “However, if even a small number of individuals who wish to do harm to our country are able to enter Canada as a result of a rushed refugee resettlement process, the results could be devastating.”
Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume said he thinks federal authorities should avoid acting too hastily when it comes to accepting refugees. “Let us open our hearts to human distress, but not to the detriment of security,” he remarked.
They both have a point.
The horrors of November 13-14 in Paris, where there was a well-orchestrated slaughter of scores of people that involved six shootings and explosions at a rock concert venue, several restaurants and a soccer stadium, are only the latest example of jihadis at work.
Yet we refuse to condemn the cultures underlying these mass murders, pretending that the perpetrators, even if allied to Al-Qaeda or Islamic State, are just fringe criminals with disordered minds, or aberrations.
In actual fact, modern Islamist-organized terrorism has been ongoing since at least 1979, when the mullahs took power in Iran. Since then, numerous groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaeda, and many others, have wreaked havoc in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.
We’ve long ago lost count of the number of atrocities that have killed thousands and thousands of people since September 11, 2001. According to one estimate, there have been over 27,000 attacks globally connected to Islamists since 9/11.
But ideologues like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and their ilk have done their work well. They’ve instilled in western liberal elites, who now govern European and North American countries, including Canada, a guilt complex so deep about their historic imperialist transgressions against the rest of the world that these politicians will now not even properly defend their nations against the existential threats that face them.
Born in Martinique, a French Caribbean colony, Fanon’s influential 1961 book Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) was a psychological analysis of the dehumanizing effects of imperialism on people in the Third World.
Written during the brutal Algerian war to overthrow French rule, Fanon’s advocacy of justified violence by the colonized people against the foreign colonizer was seen as necessary for their mental health and political liberation. It became required reading among generations of revolutionaries.
Said’s Orientalism, an even more seminal work, published in 1978, virtually created the academic field of “post-colonial studies.” A Palestinian by birth, his work has become a bible among those wishing to destroy Israel.
Said defined orientalism as a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture,” a prejudice derived from Western representations that reduces non-western peoples to irrational so-called “others.” Such cultural depictions dominate the discourse of peoples in Europe and North America towards the rest of non-white the world.
Thanks to theorists such as these, not only are we to wallow in guilt regarding the many deficiencies of western culture, which are said to include bigotry, racism, imperialism, and xenophobia, but we even have to acclaim the civilizations of others as in many ways far superior to those of the West.
Imagine letting in millions of people of the same culture as those already running amok in Paris and elsewhere. It’s as if the British were letting (unvetted) Germans into the country in 1940 during the Blitz.
Indeed, political correctness has led to the absurd situation whereby one can’t even say such things out loud — your own government will attempt to stifle and prosecute you. Again, it’s as if Winston Churchill had put you, rather than British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, in jail during the war for criticizing Nazi Germany.
As millions of refugees pour into Europe, there is no doubt that some will turn out to be potential terrorists who support Islamic State. There are already Belgian, French and German suburbs which are known as hotbeds of Islamic radicalism.
One of the eight Paris attackers recently entered Europe as a refugee via a Greek island. Fears of Islamic State sleeper agents posing as refugees to slip into western countries is now a reality.
After all, there’s nothing sacred about refugees — to say “refugee” is to say nothing more than that someone is a human being fleeing from somewhere. There were Nazi Germans and fascist collaborators who became refugees after World War II, and Hutu refugees after the Rwanda genocide.
There have already been calls in some European countries to tighten the flow of asylum seekers as a result of the Paris attacks. But Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, rejects the idea.
At the very least, Trudeau should step up the air war in Iraq, start bombing Islamic State bases and convoys in Syria and ensure that an effective screening shield is put in place so that Muslim terrorists do not sneak into the country.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
